Sunday, 25 October 2015

Bahia Gliding 2014 in Retrospect

I realized that I never got around to making a post about my visit to Gugi and Bahia Gliding last year, so here are a few words about that,

I made my third trip to Bahia in September 2014. I met a number of new friends and made a lot of awesome flights. Last year also marked the first visit to Bahia Gliding by someone from outside of Brazil other than myself. It was my friend and colleague Dr. Aleksandar Veg, professor f mechanical engineering at Belgrade University and an avid glider pilot. I think Aleksandar fell in love with Bahia, as witnessed by his return this year for another week of flying.

Last year I made a couple of attempts at 1000 km distance in Gugui's Nimbus 3T-25.5m only to come up a bit short, with the longest flight at 930 km. However, I still had a lot of memorable flights, including the last one with the Nimbus on October 4. That day a brisk 25 km/h wind from the East produced a beautiful 250 km long cloudstreet which took me farther East than I've ever been in Bahia. That was followed with a 350 km downwind dash at an average speed of 153 km/h, finishing with a total of just under 800 km.

Gugui was running the Bahia Gliding 2014 operation from the same farm as in 2013, although the talks about the long term lease didn't seem to go very well. More about that issue later in this post.